As Christmas season draws to a close, a respite for independent sellers

ENCINITAS  The last few days before Christmas on any tree lot are slow — a good kind of slow, if you ask Dan Estes.

Like the calm after a yuletide storm, when noble firs fly off the truck and then into homes around North County, Friday afternoon was a welcome respite on the Encinitas property where Estes and his family have sold Christmas trees for 30 years.

“We’re just about sold out — that’s always what you want,” he told me as a chilly breeze filled the CHRISTMAS TREE banner out front like a sail. “That’s part of the business, knowing how many trees and not overdoing it, but still having enough to get you through to the end of the season. I drove by Home Depot and they must have had 400 trees that they were mulching out back.”

That particular home improvement store came up often during our meeting Friday afternoon, perhaps because it represents the big-box retailers that drove the Estes family out of the business in the late 1990s.

“1983 was our first year, and we sold trees in San Diego, La Jolla, Mira Mesa — we had lots everywhere back then,” he recalled. “When the big-box stores came in, that changed the whole marketplace. The price that Home Depot was selling its trees for was typically what we would pay wholesale.

“Well … they have raised their prices over the years to where we can sell a tree and still make a profit,” he said.

So they are back — in 2011, Estes and his wife, Joanne, opened their first tree lot in a decade at the newly renovated Valley Fort Steakhouse off South Mission Road in Fallbrook.

This year, they also reopened the stand in their front yard, here at the end of Encinitas Boulevard, where his parents bought 10 acres on the outskirts of what would become Rancho Santa Fe 48 years ago.

That’s precisely how long Estes has lived here: “There were like three houses in the whole entire valley. It was all soybean fields,” he said, glancing around the now-busy valley with nary a hint of soybeans but plenty of real estate offices and traffic signals.

The house is technically on an unincorporated sliver of land between Encinitas and Rancho Santa Fe, giving it close access to lavishly wealthy neighborhoods — two 13-footers went to the same house this year — but also an agricultural zoning designation that has endured from his parents’ midcentury roots here.

As Estes remembers it, 1986 was his biggest year as a Christmas tree salesman. That year, they operated six lots around the county, including his busiest, a few miles away off El Camino Real.

His son, Nathan, does the bookkeeping, and his 13-year-old daughter, Jackie, helps out around the lot. There are also hired hands, but Estes figures that he does two-thirds of the work himself.

The trees come from Estacada, Ore., by the hundreds — 600 to 800 per truckload — and Estes explained that the family spends up to two off-season months a year in Christmas tree territory up north.